Palestinians and Israelis deserve better than the portrayal in a controversial opera (Commentary)

Miriam F. Elman is an associate professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, where she is a research director in its Program for the Advancement of Research on Conflict and Collaboration.

By Miriam F. Elman

Three empty chairs. Dozens of yellow ribbons tied to a tree. They formed a striking tableau on the front lawn of DeWitt's Jewish Community Center last Tuesday as over 100 people gathered to pray for the safe return of Israel's three kidnapped teenagers who were abducted on the night of June 12 as they hitchhiked home from a seminary in the West Bank. Like Jews across America and the world, for the last two weeks Syracuse's Jewish community has mobilized in support of Eyal Yifrach, 16, Naftali Frankel, 16, Gilad Shaar, 19, and their families--attending special services at local synagogues, reciting daily psalms, joining online vigils, and contributing to a "Bring Back Our Boys" social media campaign.

Jonah Jaffe, of Manlius, participates Tuesday in a vigil for three kidnapped Israeli teens held at the Jewish Community Center, in DeWitt.

Yet even as we are preoccupied with what is going on in Israel, some of us have also begun to organize around an issue closer to home: getting the Metropolitan Opera to reconsider its decision to perform "The Death of Klinghoffer," a controversial dramatization of the 1985 murder of a Jewish-American tourist, Leon Klinghoffer, aboard the hijacked Achille Lauro cruise ship. Klinghoffer's daughters accuse the opera of romanticizing the "terrorist murder of our father." Composer John Adams counters that he wrote it not to condone violence, but to "understand the hijackers and their motivations, and to look for humanity in the terrorists."

What possible humanity can be found in shooting a disabled man and then dumping him into the sea with his wheelchair? The people who did this already lost their last shred of humanity and the dramatization of this cruel and senseless murder merely rationalizes anti-Jewish violence.

And so we have joined opera lovers worldwide and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to question the wisdom of featuring "Klinghoffer" alongside Georges Bizet's magnificent Carmen and Giuseppi Verdi's Don Carlo and La Traviata. A few days ago the Met nixed plans to simulcast the opera at 2,000 movie theaters in 66 countries, the first time its international broadcasts have been canceled since they began in 2006. With rising global anti-Semitism (a recent ADL survey shows that over 1 billion of the world's adult population harbors a hatred of Jews), calling off the live HD broadcast was a no-brainer.

But there is an even stronger reason for the Met to cancel the opera's Oct. 20 Lincoln Center premiere and its eight scheduled performances, or at least postpone: The timing is awful. Perhaps the Met's managers are unaware of it, but the circumstances surrounding the 1985 hijacking and the June 12 kidnappings are eerily alike.

The four Palestinian hijackers who kept the Achille Lauro crew and passengers hostage demanded the release of 50 prisoners being held in Israel. Sound familiar? It should. Because, there can now be no doubt that Hamas, the militant group most likely responsible for snatching the three teens, will also try to swap them for Palestinian prisoners.

The plight of Palestinian prisoners has long been a sore point. This past year's fruitless American-backed peace talks required a phased release of 104 of them, including perpetrators of notorious terror attacks. Israel's refusal to set the last group of 26 free has caused such rancor that Hamas, faced with a record low approval rating, is gambling that it can regain the public's trust by using the teens as bargaining chips in negotiations to bring them--and maybe even hundreds more--back.

Most people can tell the difference between taking military personnel captive and treating civilians as pawns. The attempt by Hamas leaders to cast the kidnapped boys as soldiers, while appalling, is clever because all past Israeli-Palestinian prisoner exchanges have involved IDF hostages. Since the early 1950s Israel has released nearly 7,000 prisoners to free fewer than 20 of its soldiers, including staff sergeant Gilad Shalit, who after spending five years in captivity, was exchanged in 2011 for 1,027 prisoners, together responsible for the murder of nearly 600 Israeli civilians. In the majority of these lopsided prisoner swaps, the Israeli soldiers had already been killed and came home in body bags. Some of the freed prisoners have gone on to perpetrate further terrorist attacks. Last week Ziad Awad, a Palestinian man who was set free as part of the 2011 Shalit deal, was charged for a murder he is alleged to have committed last April near Hebron, the same West Bank area that has become the focus of Israel's massive manhunt today.

The hijacking of the Achille Lauro and the kidnapping of three Israeli kids do not define the Israeli-Palestinian relationship. But the Met will have only itself to blame when audiences leave "Klinghoffer" believing that pent-up Palestinian frustrations inevitably give way to horrible acts of violence, or that Palestinians spend their time running an extortion racket, scheming to kidnap innocent people just so that murderers can be ransomed free. Palestinians and Israelis deserve better. They need audiences to learn more about the courageous, idealistic, and caring people--on both sides--who struggle daily to achieve Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation. Examples abound. Consider Oasis of Peace, a cooperative village in Israel that was founded in the late 1970s by a group of Jews and Arabs and is still going strong. Or think about a new leadership program supported by the New Israel Fund that brings Jews and Arabs together to devise new community-wide programs for celebrating Israel's Independence Day while also commemorating the Naqba (the catastrophe that befell the Palestinian people in 1948).

Shame on the Met for using the brutal murder of a Jewish-American tourist as a vehicle for acknowledging the tragedy of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In times of conflict the arts have an important role to play in helping us to question received wisdoms and to consider pathways to peace. Unfortunately, the "Death of Klinghoffer" will do neither.